an interview with Antler

Antler, the blog of author Dave Harrity (Making Manifest), posted an interview with me today! I share revision tips, a poem, hopes, dreams and more!

when you picture someone reading your poetry, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others?

I picture my great-great-great granddaughter coming upon my dusty, well-worn poetry book in a box in the attic. Taking it down and thumbing through it while the babies are napping. Smudging it with greasy fingers because she’s reading while cooking dinner. Reading it as she would a diary or a long letter. I know it is a little romantic for this to be my ideal reader, her hair in a loose ponytail and wearing yesterday’s T-shirt, but she’s there behind every poem I write—this future daughter, who will never know me, reading my work and connecting with me through that long echo. I hope to write something worth telling her.

You can read the rest HERE

interview on Balancing the Tide

Balancing the Tide, one of my favorite interview websites that features interviews from mothers who are artists and writers, posted an interview with me today!

"Tell us about your relationship to your art.

I wanted to write fiction when I was a little girl, but in college I began reading modern poetry and was lured away.  .  . "

You can read the rest here

interview with Dave Harrity, author of Making Manifest

Making Manifest, by Dave Harrity,  is a creative writing workbook / devotional book which I reviewed earlier this year , and one of the best books i've read recently--certainly a unique book as well. if you haven't already, add it to your christmas list.

i am always interested in hearing from authors about their work, and since harrity is also a poet, i thought his perspective might be doubly interesting. he was kind enough to allow me to interview him, so....

1)    Pen, pencil, computer or typewriter?

DH: My personal preference is to use pens to journal and pencils to rewrite poems in revision. Writing by hand is important to the process of my own creation. It reminds me I’m human (the physical tension of scribbling) and that I’m the one in control of the arc of creation. I could get behind using a typewriter (there’s enough human presence in it to keep things balanced), but not a screen until the piece is ready to head to a magazine editor, ready to begin being prepped to go into the world. Computers dictate enough of my life already and I want keep things slow, calculated, clear. Plus, I like to cross out, not delete. My general thought: computers kill creativity for the writer. They have their place in the process, but it’s remote to the act of creation.

2)    What are three books my readers should go out and buy right now? 
DH: You’re mean to make me choose three ;-)
Here are three books of recent-ish non-fiction that have been pretty profound for me...

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Prisig

Iron John, by Robert Bly

3)    Why poetry? 
DH: Because it resists the need to be relevant and engages every facet of literary consciousness and skill.

4)    If you could switch places with any other poet, dead or alive, who would it be? 
DH: I resist answering this question because I feel that only recently have I come into my own voice—and I'm proud that I wouldn't trade it for that of another. But, since you're not asking that exactly, I'd say I'd switch places with William Blake, without hesitation. To take a vacation in that guy's imagination would be terrifying and gorgeous and spellbinding.

5)    What is your writing schedule like? Do you write every day? 
DH: Yes, I write every day. It keeps me human and sane, reflective and attentive. I almost always write in the morning when my mind and the day are fresh and the world outside my window is beginning to stir. It all seems so synchronous. Once I fill up a journal, I go back in and mine the usable material to begin compiling poems, stories, essays, etc.

6)    What is the best advice you've ever received about writing? 
DH: Keep a journal, write every day, and write about everything that crosses your mind without shame or fear. For your creative writing, remember that revision is the real writing—that's where you can doll the thing up after it happens. Next after that, listen to the advice of editors who reject you. They're a guardian of your work, not a gatekeeper of a world you cannot enter.

7)    What is the worst advice you've ever received about writing?  
DH: Publish a lot. I think it's terrible advice. It's terrible for one's creative development, craft awareness, and aesthetic sensibility. It will keep your writing toothless, and—in the digital age—will keep you focused on your metrics and popularity rather than loving, caring for, and cultivating the beauty of language in your own life.

8)    Sometimes it seems like churches don't know what to do with their writers, poets, artists. What do you think the poet/writer/artist's place is in the church? 
DH: The margin. It's where we're supposed to be. It's where all prophets belong. And we all know that saying about prophets and hometowns... I think it's best that believers stop trying to make arts relevant to the church and get back to the focus of actually making the best art possible—not Christian art, just art. If my travels and workshops with churches have taught me one thing, it's that art creates a unique form of community, and if that community is authentic and loving, people will want to add to it. They'll bring their voices and talents and learn how to actually use them. And they'll learn to use them for the gifts that they are and not with any other motivation other than bringing forward the God within to meet the God without.

9)    What inspired you to write Making Manifest?  
DH: I wanted to make a craft book that I would have wanted to read as a creative of faith when I first started writing. The project began as I was teaching at a seminary and I realized that all my artistic disciplines were in fact deeply spiritual disciplines as well. And that those disciplines could be of great benefit to people who wanted to enrich their own spiritual nature. Lastly, I'm a firm believer that language (and lack there of in the form of silence) is for everyone—God's gift to us—and that it's the key to reaching toward divinity. I didn't see a book out there that was trying to keep that hand open and accessible, so I wrote one. My hope is that it will be one of the first in a long line of books like it (written by other authors—see a book like "Drawn In" by Troy Bronsink) and that it will not be the best one on the subject. I want the book to goad others into making better things.

10) Would you be willing to share one of your own poems (or a link to it)?  
DH: Sure... Here's one that was published by Sawmill Magazine a while back...

QUANTA

Here is one thing I think I know:

each voice a variation of inflection—its own instinct and image.

Today, flustered movements of birds and leaves, children running in autumn.

Years ago, dianthus dusk

against the exact silver of a hospital room.

It is best to keep this near the front of me, a mode of you I want to understand.

The pinkish sleep of mother and newborn,

the intimacy of strangers.

Something like starlight

in the throat. Something like silence being realized as a friend.

Which it is more, I can’t be sure.

The sun moves its circuit—the constant

going down again—clipped array of long shadows, paper-doll precision.

These exchanges:

in tenuous twilight, the birds wind corkscrews, moan

to blue apogee in air, only to dive back down.

What is there that stays the same?

The boy and the girl laughing through motion, light bounding

open from their bodies.

interview with Jeannine Hall Gailey

Earlier this year I took a class on fairytale poetry, and, soon after, happened to read UnexplainedFevers by Jeannine Hall Gailey, a poetry collection that explores different fairytales through persona. Having just learned how difficult it is to write a good fairytale poem, I was captivated by this book. This week I was lucky enough to get the chance to interview Gailey, and that is what I have to share with you today!

1) Pen, pencil, computer or typewriter?

JHG: I’ve been typing poems into a computer since I was six years old, using my Dad’s old TRS-80. My handwriting is so atrocious that if I write something on a scrap of paper I usually can’t read it afterwards or figure out what I was trying to say.

2) What are three books my readers should go out and buy right now?

JHG: ONLY three? I don’t think I could narrow it down that much. But I’ll tell you the books I recommend for my National students and for people whose manuscripts I edit. It’s mostly first books, because I think they help newer writers envision books as projects, rather than just thinking about individual poems, but others are third or fifth books. And these are just a handful, I could recommend a lot more: Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa. Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life. Denise Duhamel’s Kinky. Oliver de la Paz’s Names Over Houses. Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands. If you check out my blog I’m always talking about a new book I’ve loved and reviewed – just off the top of my head, some other great first books include Annette Spaulding-Convy’s In Broken Latin, Jericho Brown’s Please, and Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning.
I also advise my poetry students to read widely – short fiction, novels, memoirs, creative non-fiction, plays. I often find inspiration from scientific historical documents and short fiction, myself.

3) Why poetry?

JHG: I read all the genres, but I think I like poetry the most because it is the most like a piece of visual art – you have to make an art work out of thoughts, ideas, images and sound that stays in the mind of a reader. It’s a challenge! Also, it lends itself well to people with short attention spans.

4) If you could switch places with any other poet, dead or alive, who would it be?

JHG: Louise Gluck has always had a great shoe collection, and she wrote a poem about a fancy cheese shop that she lives close to. That sounds like a good life to me! But seriously, I wouldn’t switch places – I love the time and place I live in, as apocalyptic and doom-bringing as the headlines seem. I mean, has there ever been a better time for women writers who write about comic book heroines, embittered fairy tale characters, and robots?

5) If you could choose one book to have never been written, what would it be?

JHG: If I’m being snarky, maybe Twilight. But seriously, every creation is someone’s baby. Why stamp something out?

6) What is the best advice you've ever received about writing?

JHG: Maybe something about “doing what you’re doing, but take it even further.” I think taking your own tendencies, obsessions, and styles to extremes almost always leads to more interesting risks.

7) What is the worst advice you've ever received about writing?

JHG: Write what you know. Sooo boring. Write what you want to know. Do some research, use your imagination. Don’t limit yourself – that’s how we end up with so many boring books each year, because someone was told “write what you know.”

8) So, your latest book, Unexplained Fevers, is your third book. What has your journey to publication been like?

JHG: It’s had its ups and downs. The publisher of my second book, She Returns to the Floating World, Kitsune Books, was going to publish Unexplained Fevers originally. I had art work, blurbs, the manuscript edited, everything ready. But the editor and publisher, Anne Petty, got very sick, closed the press, and sadly, recently passed away. It was a blow both emotionally (she was a wonderful person, presence and a real mover-and-shaker among the speculative literary community) and mentally to figure out what to do next. I sent the book out to a few publishers – including one I’d heard about in a tweet from Margaret Atwood, of all people, an Irish small publisher called New Binary Press – and the editor wrote back to say they would like to publish it. I actually had a couple of offers from really nice small presses for this third book, which was really encouraging. I’m happy I went with New Binary Press – and soon they’ll be putting out an e-book of Unexplained Fevers as well!

9) Please tell us a bit about your latest book.

Unexplained Fevers allowed me to revisit some of the territory I explored in my first book, Becoming the Villainess, with a focus on some of the heroines from fairy tales that I avoided because I found them boring or too passive...Rapunzel, Snow White, The Princess from The Princess and the Pea, Sleeping Beauty. I decided to use these characters as a way to talk about the kind of mysterious health problems that young and middle-aged women tend to deal with – anorexia, chronic fatigue syndrome, heroine addiction, bleeding disorders, problems having children, etc. It sounds like a super-fun cheery ride, right? But seriously, I tried to take a little bit of a lighter look at the problems of contemporary women past their “happy endings” – after waking up, after being rescued, after escaping the tower. Deconstructing the mythology of “Once Upon a Time” and its promises, but also having a little fun with it.

10) Would you be willing to share a poem or link to a poem from Unexplained Fevers?

Some of my favorite reasons to read fairy tales is to discover the embedded wisdom from women in the past who weren’t free to talk about, say, child abuse, contraception, pregnancy fears – and to try to discern the hidden advice. This poem is one of the “advice” poems, called “Advice from the Pages of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”

Advice Left Between the Pages of Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Life is not a fairy tale, and this isn’t your pumpkin coach.
You’re not lost in some magic wood,
and that blood on your hands isn’t from an innocent stag
at all. Princess, remember to fill your pockets
with more than bread crumbs, and
if you can’t sleep don’t blame the legumes
beneath the sheets. One look at that glass coffin
they’ve set up for you should tell you
everything you need to know about their intentions.
Remember a lot of girls end up dismembered, and
every briar rose has its thorn.
Forget the sword and magic stone,
forget enchantments and focus on the profit margin,
the hard line. Read the subtext.

Interview with Kathryn Mattingly

so, as i've taken-up with writing again, after my maternity-leave from it, i've been wanting to add some more writing-related content to the blog; i am especially interested in adding interviews with writers (leave a comment if you'd like to be a part of this!). it is always interesting and inspiring to me to learn how another writer operates.

the first interview of the bunch is with a fellow wintergoosepublishing author, kathryn mattingly. her first novel, benjamin, was released this year, and her short story collection, fractured hearts, is coming out this january, followed by  her second novel, journey, in november 2014. she blogs at pen publish promote, and you can check out links to all the places benjamin available HERE.

Pen, pencil, computer, or typewriter?

Definitely computer. As a starving artist (specifically, a laid off college teacher just returning to teaching as we speak) I am out of my favorite perfume, makeup and skin products. I haven’t even bought a new outfit for as long as I can remember because every spare penny goes into promoting Benjamin but yes, I just bought a brand new state of the art MacBook Pro to replace my four year old one (not old in Apple years). I gave it to my husband and he is thrilled. 

How long have you been writing? Was this a from birth thing where you wrote before you spoke or an epiphany much later in life?

I have been writing my whole life. I wrote short stories in elementary school that won me some recognition in kid contests. I wrote for the high school newspaper under an alias so I could be free to voice my opinion about controversial subjects at the time. In college I had quite a bit of poetry published in the University of Oregon English Department Literary Journals. Once my children were half grown, I returned to school for a graduate degree in education, to begin a career as an educator. That’s also when I began writing novels.

How have you prepared to be the best writer possible?

I took a lot of English and literature courses in college. Throughout the decade where I began to write seriously I continually attended writing retreats, workshops and conferences. I studied under a different New York Times best selling author each of the five years I attended the Maui Writer’s Retreat. It is a satisfying experience on many levels for a fledgling writer to be mentored by a successful author. I also read a lot of books on writing, recommended by authors I studied under at these and other retreats, or mentioned at conferences I attended.

Tell me about any awards and recognition you’ve received for your writing.

My debut novel, Benjamin, was a New Century Quarterly Finalist and four of my short stories have won awards for excellence by various publishers. My whole short story collection won an award from Carpe Diem Press, and they were going to publish it but then went bankrupt at the last minute. That was somewhat heartbreaking. The good news is that Winter Goose (my publisher) is releasing the collection this January under a new name and with some additional stories in it.

Who has influenced you as a writer and what authors do you enjoy reading?

I have been influenced by many different authors and read a large variety of books and genres. I have always been a prolific reader. I would say that lately I am leaning toward literary fiction novels that give me deeply complex characters trying to maneuver their way through a landmine of complications that have suddenly destroyed their everyday world as they once knew it. These are the situations in life that cause us to examine who we really are and to either grow or shrink as individuals. This by the way, is also the type of book I write. Some examples would be Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay, The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark, Little Bee by Chris Cleave and The Silent Wife by ASA Harrison.

What is your writing process like? Do you write everyday or when the muse strikes?

I feel the need to write every day whether it is fiction, a blog post, an article about someone or a long personal email to an old friend - whatever is on my mind. I do far more editing however than original writing on any given day. I just finished editing my short story collection and now I will continue to polish my next novel.

What is the best advice you have ever gotten about writing? The best advise is a quote that was given to me by my first writing mentor, Elizabeth Engstrom (who wrote Lizzie Borden). I have kept it in my mind and heart ever since- Persistence is the key. It is, by the way, the most important thing a writer needs- to be persistent.